Death Sentence Upheld For Nirbhaya Rapists

Nearly five years after a 23-year-old medical student on her way home from a movie was gang-raped and tortured on a moving bus in Delhi, the Supreme Court has confirmed death for four convicts.

On December 16 2012, the young woman and her friend boarded a bus in south Delhi, assured by the driver that they would be dropped off at their destination. The two were then attacked and the woman was gang-raped by six men, brutalized with an iron rod and her intestines were pulled out. She died in a Singapore hospital 13 days later.

“These men should be hanged. There is no crime more barbaric than this….I’m certain about that,” said the father of the woman, who came to be known as “Nirbhaya”.

A trial court had ruled in 2013 that they should be hanged and the high court confirmed the sentence. But the four – Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta and Mukesh – challenged it in the Supreme Court.

The four men convicted in the case, Mukesh Singh, 24, Pawan Gupta, 20, Vinay Sharma, 22, and Akshay Thakur, 29, were awarded death sentence by Delhi High Court in March 2014.

The Supreme Court later stayed the death sentence of four convicts and allowed them to make appeal for their convictions. The fifth convict hanged himself, while the juvenile convict, who was awarded three years in a reformation home, was released in December 2015.

Jyoti Singh, dubbed Nirbhaya, was raped and killed by five men and a juvenile in the National Capital in 2012. The 23-year-old was gangraped and dumped by the roadside. She later succumbed to her injuries.